Design Ideas

Use visual tools to create the home design of your dreams

March 14, 2014

The reason why many homeowners procrastinate about re-decorating comes down to heavy lifting and the drudgery that precedes the fun part of selecting accessories, soft furnishings and beautiful wood floors like those in Anderson's Vintage Walnut 5-inch collection.

But there's one handy tool - a storyboard - that can help people pull together home design plans and get a real-life sense of what the end result of a makeover will be, reported the Virginian-Pilot. Storyboards are often used by professional designers to create a room's visual image from colored drawings, swatches of wallpaper, upholstery and samples of wood stains. As a decorating project progresses, it has both a decorative and a record-keeping purpose.

Laying out the plan
Before gathering their materials, home decorators should collect pictures from magazines and catalogs that may serve as inspiration for their color schemes and design style. Narrow down the choices to a particular style and color combination.

Next, come up with some adjectives that describe how the room will look and the atmosphere that you want to create. It may be classic and elegant in a bedroom or cozy and comfortable in a family-friendly den. This is also a good time to address functional issues, including the right finishes for floors and architectural features that will become major elements of a room design.

Focusing on details
For homeowners who like to hone in on details, a scaled plan drawn on graph paper will show precise furniture placement in relation to doors, windows and other permanent features. Cut-outs of furniture can be arranged on the board. For a 3-D effect, miniature versions of furniture can be constructed from foam core or craft materials.

People can simulate moving heavy furnishings, installing wallpaper and choosing paint colors all with the ease of this illustrative tool. It helps to note how much paint, fabric or other materials are needed to decorate the room and keep this list with the storyboard to take along during shopping. In this way, it becomes not only a decorative aid, but one that assists homeowners in record-keeping for their projects.

"[A storyboard] is another tool not only to present [ideas], but also to record them so it's the formal record of what's going to be done. It's part of the design process," Susan Pniewski, director of interior design with H&A Architects & Engineers in Virginia Beach, told the Virginian-Pilot.